How to conduct effective Performance Tests

Have you thought about statistical distribution fitting of your application's user request arrival pattern ?

Check out the Posters(3 slides) and the paper titled "The Forgotten facts in the workload modeling of an ebusiness application" published in the QAI conference - STC 2007 held at Bangalore on Aug 24-25 2007.

This paper pin points few of the most forgotton facts in the workload modeling of an web application.

Look for the entire article here...

Poster Slides Presented in th QAI Conference - Poster Session
Slide 1 :



Slide 2:
Slide 3 :

Performance Testing -Begineers Reference

For any one who is very new to Performance testing or who is just into performance testing and want to know more......

Scott Barber's Articles/Series about User Experience and Best Practices in performance Testing would help you to set your directions. (http://www.perftestplus.com/pubs.htm)

Infact i started my own way from Scott Barber's above mentioned series. I have read them atleast 3-4 times completely and even now whenever i find time, i still love to read them again as i feel i could get some ideas each time i read them again and again.

Give it a try and track your improvement. If it doesnt works , then write to me. I can help you to make you realize what went wrong.

A Book on Performance Testing for beginners....

Thanks a lot viewers. Thanks for your encouragement by your kind mails.

I am planning to publish a book on Performance Testing comprising all that i learned during the past 3 years of the experience in my career.

I started my carrer as a functional tester and pushed or pulled into Performance testing fortunately thereby i came to know about this area. Mine is a hard way and i didnt had much support in terms of helping hands to get to know about the fundamendals before i started handling the projects. Slowly i learned a lot and finally ended up in unlearning a lot because of the ignorance i had initial days.

The objective of this book is to help fellow performance testers so that they can spend their quality time in achieving great things rather than reinventing the wheel :)


"Performance Testing Handbook - A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners"


The bird's eye view of topics covered in this book includes,

1. Why Performance Testing is crucial.
2. Dynamics and myths in performance testing
3. Deriving Quantitative performance test goals
4. Common mistakes in performance testing which i learned
5. Overview of performance test tools - How to choose the best tool
6. Setting up the performance test environment
7. Comprehensive support for writting test scripts
8. Application benchamarking
9. Quick look at the Industry standard benchmarks
10. A helping in setting up the performance Test Strategy
11. Performance Test Monitoring
12. Performance Test Execution - When and how to choose various tests (Load, Stress, Volume, Soak, Endurance tests).
13.Bottlenecks identification strategy
14.Reporting - How does it matters so much
15.Road Ahead - towards mathematical modeling and queuing theory basics

Web Log Analysis

A typical issue which i faced during web log analysis...

While conducting Performance testing for applications which are falling into the category of Post-Production case, the most important activity that needs to be done is web log analysis. The web server logs are the gold mines which hold all the information about the server during the load condition.

During the web log analysis, look for the peak hour traffic time and identify what is the server load in terms of hits/sec and in terms of users. Based on this statistics, derive performance test goals by considering the business forecasts.

I would like to share a typical issue which I faced while doing web log analysis for a typical post production category of an application. The application under test uses a shared web-app server (IIS) in which there was 2 other applications deployed. Now, the problem is the web server log files have the traces of all 3 applications together as these files are common for a server and not specific for each of the applications running on the server.

The web log analyzer tool which I was using doesn’t have any option to set filters. In that case, I tried using a web log analyzer tool (123LogAnalyzer tool) which provides a filter option to filter out the traces pertaining to a specific application and export the filtered log file into a text file. For example, if the application under test has a context root as ‘methodologies’ (http://132.23.34.21/methodologies/......), then try setting up this URL in the filter and create the text files for your application of interest.

Now you could use the newly generated text file to feed it into any of the log analyzer tool which you are confident enough and proceed with your performance goal setting. My kind advice is that before choosing the log analysis tool of your choice, analyze the accuracy of log analysis thoroughly.

For more details on the various web log analysis tools, look for the web log analysis comparison article available in my blog.

Hope it helps!!!